Virginia Durr

By all rights she should have lived a life of privilege and ease. She was born to Birmingham’s “magic circle.”

However, her life began to change at Wellesley, when this daughter of a Birmingham minister was required to share a table with African-Americans or leave school. She returned home with a broadened perspective. The “deep-eyed Southern bigot,” as she described her youthful self, would become a powerful activist, organizer, and leader in the civil rights movement.

Her sister married Hugo Black, and she married Clifford Durr (Hall of Fame 1998), an attorney who was impressed by her tenacious work in a law library. The Durrs went to Washington when Mr. Durr served in President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration. While there, Virginia Durr began her tireless work against the poll tax, a protracted battle for black suffrage that did not end until passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As a founding member of the Southern Conference on Human Welfare in 1938, Mrs. Durr was vilified as a communist agitator by no less than Bull Connor who tried to break up their integrated meeting in Birmingham.

Her criticism of the Korean War cost Mr. Durr his position in Washington, and when the couple returned to Alabama they were outcasts, branded as socialists and worse. In 1954 she was called for questioning before the Senate’s anti-communist subcommittee. When Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to move to the back of a Montgomery bus, the Durrs helped bail her out and from the first night of her ordeal offered wise counsel and advice. Mrs. Durr’s “upbringing of privilege did not prohibit her from wanting equality for all people,” Mrs. Parks said upon her friend’s death. “She was a lady and a scholar, and I shall miss her.”

In 1997, Durr received an honorary doctorate from The University of Alabama, where her husband had been a Rhodes Scholar graduate. To the end, Virginia Durr remained a passionate, articulate, and tireless advocate for justice. “The problem is,” she said, “once you open a gate, there’s another and another gate beyond each one. It makes you think you want to live forever. . . .”